Tag Archives | BP

Who gets your vote for most heinous CEO of the year? From Marketwatch:

Tony Hayward is Lloyd Blankfein’s new best friend. For months, Blankfein, chief executive of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. has been the CEO ALTH (America Loves To Hate). He’s been defiant before Congress, unapologetic, a defender of ruthless Wall Street practices, invoking God and bare-knuckle capitalism in the same breath.

His firm has been accused of betting against clients, masking Greece’s debt problems, taking backdoor bailouts through American International Group Inc. and good, old-fashioned fraud.

Enter Hayward, the bumbling, stumbling chief executive of BP PLC, and the man ultimately responsible for the disaster that began April 20 on Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico.

Hayward’s BP is blamed for 11 dead workers, an environmental catastrophe, a slow and inadequate response and insensitivity to the havoc his company has sprung upon nature and the livelihood of those on the Gulf Coast.

And the second angel sounded, and as it were a great mountain burning with fire was cast into the sea: and the third part of the sea became blood.
Revelation 8:8, King James Bible

A summer of Hell is coming to the Gulf Coast. The situation grows more dire every passing day as BP continues to own their crime scene and fumbles their “Top Kill” solution. An astounding revelation was made thursday of a second giant plume of oil six miles wide and twenty-two miles long discovered by marine scientists from the University of South Florida. As of Friday, scientists in Louisiana discovered another vast plume of oil. BP has been trying to mask the extent of the damage it has done by spraying the toxic chemical dispersants to hide the oil under the surface of the water. Watch Phillippe Cousteau Jr.

I have received a number of emails about the environmental impacts of the BP oil spill. The size of the spill and the impacts on wildlife in the Gulf of Mexico ecosystems have prompted a number of readers to write:

“Bob, it looks like you are right, the environmental damage and pollution are the goal and not the unintended consequences.”

Others have noted the irony that the leak is believed to have started on Earth Day, April 22, when the Deepwater Horizon sank. [1]

Dana Milbank, at the Washington Post, appears to realize there is story behind the story of Obama’s bizarre behavior at his lengthy news conference yesterday at the White House.

“For eight years we had a president who refused to accept blame. Now we have one who seems to enjoy it.

He decorated the East Room with wuddas, cuddas and shuddas: “We should have busted through those constraints.

Kevin Costner is in town hoping star power and his oil spill clean-up machine will help in the gulf.
It promises to help clean up the oil spill. And it's got some big backing. "Years before I got involved oil spills would come and, I would wonder why we couldn't clean this up," says Actor Kevin Costner. He's invested in a company that invented a processing machine that turns oil into water. "It's robust. Works at the speed that someone talked about, 200,000 gallons a minute. But it takes 99% of the oil."
Using a small prototype of the machine, Costner demonstrated how it works for a group of stressed parish officials today. "We'll take this any day over the black oil that's covering south Plaquemines right now," says Plaquemines Parish President Billy Nungesser.
The larger centrifuge model can collect up to 3,000 gallons of oil a day and right now, 31 are available. The response: There are no better options. "I think it's a no-brainer to try it," says Jefferson Parish Councilman John Young. Nungesser says, "I think we need to put it to work." And St. Bernard Parish President Craig Taffaro says, "Let's get this out there. See what it can do."

The amount of oil spilling into the Gulf of Mexico may be at least 10 times the size of official estimates, according to an exclusive analysis conducted for NPR.

At NPR’s request, experts examined video that BP released Wednesday. Their findings suggest the BP spill is already far larger than the 1989 Exxon Valdez accident in Alaska, which spilled at least 250,000 barrels of oil.

BP has said repeatedly that there is no reliable way to measure the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico by looking at the oil gushing out of the pipe. But scientists say there are actually many proven techniques for doing just that.

Steven Wereley, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Purdue University, analyzed videotape of the seafloor gusher using a technique called particle image velocimetry.

A computer program simply tracks particles and calculates how fast they are moving.

BARATARIA, Louisiana— It is the perfect blue sky, humidity-free spring day in bayou country that makes you feel like everything should be all right in the world.

The intercoastal waterway leading to the Gulf of Mexico is calm, the canals that host fishing boats behind each neat suburban home reflect the midday sun, and a cool breeze washes away extraneous sounds and smells.

But despite the bucolic day, fisherman Mike Roberts is angry. “Osama bin Laden couldn’t have done a better job of destroying a part of the American economy. This oil spill? It’s like the ultimate act of terrorism. And these guys should be treated like terrorists.”

The guys he’s referring to: BP and Transocean executives, and the Mineral Management Service, the federal agency that was supposed to police the oil companies but appears to have been very cozy with the industry instead.

We finally know the main two dispersants that BP and the U.S. government are using to treat the ongoing Gulf spill.

Both, by their maker’s own admission, have the “potential to bioconcentrate,” and both have “moderate toxicity to early life stages of fish, crustaceans, and mollusks,” according to a study by Exxon, the company that originally developed them.

Their use may be the least-bad course, given the importance of minimizing oil’s effect on coastal wetlands. But a little digging into the chemical makeup of these two substances, which are being dumped in vast quantities into the Gulf, reveals that they could potentially do far more harm than good, both to the Gulf and to humans who later eat from it.

As ProPublica reported Monday, information about dispersants is “kept secret under competitive trade laws.” I’ve spent the last several days trying to confirm what many in the ocean-ecology and public health worlds seemed to know, but no one would say officially: that two different dispersants sold under the banner of Corexit were being used in vast quantities.

The explosion on the BP oil rig Deepwater Horizon on April 20 off Louisiana’s coast, which took the lives of 11 workers and has resulted in a massive oil slick that threatens economic and environmental ruin for the Gulf Coast, stands as a powerful exposure of American capitalism.

Each day brings new revelations that federal regulators under both the Bush and Obama administrations aided and abetted BP and the oil industry as they disregarded safety and environmental precautions that might have prevented the disaster.

Some of the most recent revelations include:

• In 2000 the Minerals Management Service (MMS) requested industry advice on problems related to the cementing used around deep sea well caps to stop blowouts. The oil industry never produced recommendations, and no regulation was put in place.

• A 2002 study conducted by the MMS revealed that vital equipment on oil rig blowout preventers did not function.